Blown away

Glam rock was cheap, trashy and kitsch - and for a brief moment, it offered a lifeline to a boy on the brink of adolescence and unsure of his own sexuality. Novelist Jake Arnott revisits the world of David Bowie and the temptations of his youth

I was just old enough to pick up on the vague sense of disillusionment at the start of the Seventies. I remember my oldest sister Deborah's disappointment when she came back from the Isle of Wight festival in August 1970. Jimi Hendrix had been so stoned that she hadn't bothered to stay to watch all of his set. Three weeks later he was dead. All of the hope and excitement of the Sixties was coming to an end. I was just beginning to become interested in music and fashion but it seemed that the party was already over. I wasn't yet 10 and already I was feeling disappointed.

There was 'progressive rock' but its patched denim authenticity seemed sanctimonious and a little boring. Meanwhile the singles chart was invaded by squeaky-clean bubblegum pop; 'Sugar Sugar' by the Archies, and then the Osmonds. In denial of its own depression, mindless euphoria spread across the emptiness of pop culture like the broad grin of an idiot.

The Vietnam War went on, violence in Northern Ireland was escalating. All the peace demos had seemed a waste of time. It was a time of regression. Love was turning into rage. Even having fun could seem counter-revolutionary. On May Day 1971, the Angry Brigade bombed Biba, London's trendiest boutique. The self-styled urban guerrillas issued their Communiqué No 8: '... in fashion as in everything else, Capitalism can only go backwards.' It was an attack on consumerism and the exploitation of workers but most of all, it was a Situationist reprisal against the 'spectacle of society'. Biba was an emporium of Art Deco decadence; retro and reactionary, it was the epitome of commodity fetishism. But what the bombers failed to grasp was that it was fabulous. Kids needed some sort of sparkle to brighten up the already drab new decade. At exactly the same moment as this peculiar political action, glam was exploding. The adolescent glitter rockers didn't want to blow it up, they just wanted to shoplift from it.

'It's all boogie-woogie now,' Marc Bolan declared to Melody Maker in the same week. Marc was the decade's first discernible pop hero. He had been the flower generation's last great hope but he had 'sold out', gone electric with a 12-bar stomp called 'Hot Love', preening himself in a purple chartreuse suit and glitter on his face on Top of the Pops. The old-school freaks felt betrayed. John Peel, for one, reflected in his diary: 'I was fond of the old Marc, although I don't care much for the current Marc who is causing riots wherever he goes. The Sun has printed pieces describing him as the new Beatles. That, regrettably, is showbiz.'

But we had no regrets; showbiz is what we wanted. We were Bolan's 'children of the revolution', too young to have known the pleasures of the Sixties. I was growing up in Buckinghamshire, close enough to London to be constantly aware that we were missing out on something, edging towards puberty, anxious of what that might bring.

Maybe cheap thrills were all that were left to us. Aylesbury was a suburban dystopia in the early Seventies, its new Friars Square shopping centre such a fine example of concrete brutalism that Stanley Kubrick was inspired to film some external scenes for A Clockwork Orange there. Part of the ugly structure contained Europe's largest Woolworth's, a source of much civic pride. In 1972 Pete Donne's mother had just won a competition, allowing her to spend £1,000 in that oversized Woolies.

Pete was my best friend and role model back then. He was, at 13, two years older than me, and always ahead of the fashions. His big sister, Sue, had even hung out with Bolan (sitting in the back of a limo he had told her, rather ominously, that he 'hated cars'). With his share of his mum's prize he bought a stereo. The LPs he got to go with it were Rod Stewart's Never a Dull Moment, and Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie. He also bought a pair of bright blue loons and a pair of girl's platform shoes in blue and yellow from Sasha in Oxford Street. Bowie had launched his Ziggy persona at the Borough Assembly Hall in Aylesbury in January 1972, a week after he declared to Melody Maker that he was bisexual. In June he had languidly draped his arm on Mick Ronson's shoulder as they performed 'Starman' on Top of the Pops. That summer Pete hennaed his hair carrot-red, like Ziggy. I remember being in his back garden, playing at being Bowie and Ronson, and feeling a strange sense of excitement as he put his arm around me.

It was the year I passed the 11-plus. I remember arriving at Aylesbury Grammar School that autumn and seeing all the third-formers sporting feather cuts they'd got from Justin's Unisex Hairdressers at the Gyratory System. But no one looked as flamboyant as Pete. On a school trip to the Science Museum he bunked off and spent the afternoon down the road at Biba, shoplifting a knitted silk scarf as a souvenir. I would like to have been as bold but I was awkward and nervous about my sexuality. Pete was straight; he just had a healthy narcissism I could only long for. I was worried about being queer. There's a line in 'Lady Stardust' by Bowie where the voice of a fan muses: 'I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey.'

'I think rock should be tarted up,' Bowie had declared. 'Made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be a clown, the Pierrot medium.' In projecting his Ziggy alter ego, he demonstrated his theatrical understanding of the genre. He had taken the Gay Liberation Front's concept of 'radical drag' and made it even more provocative simply because he looked so good. Much has been said of the American influences on his style - the Velvets, the Factory crowd and, of course, Iggy Pop - but there was something essentially English about his lineage back to one of Shakespeare's famous fools. In his great finale, 'Rock'n'Roll Suicide', Ziggy implores, 'Give me your hands' which, unconscious or not, is a direct reference to Puck's speech at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Along with Bolan and Bowie, Roxy Music were very knowingly playing the glam game. Using images of Fifties sci-fi and B-movies noir, they presented the rock band as performance art. 'Futuristic nostalgia,' wrote Charles Shaar Murray. 'A boppin' high school hop band of the future, a 21st-century rock revival band.' Their frontman, Bryan Ferry, had studied with Richard Hamilton, the godfather of the British pop art scene who taught him that style is the projecting of something that would work on more than one level and provoke differing responses. 'One person, maybe a Hampstead intellectual, would say "How camp!"; a kid would respond by saying "That's weird!". The kid would probably get a bigger kick,' Ferry said in an interview in July 1972. They were dressed by designer Antony Price, who gave the group their retro futurist look. 'Myself and Roxy were very aware of what we were doing,' Bowie acknowledged, 'very aware of breaking down the barriers between high and low art.' The very success of this objective soon meant that the glam bandwagon was rolling. And with those barriers down a lot of what was to follow was very low art indeed.

And it was bloody hard for us fans to be clear about such cultural distinctions. When Bowie released the blistering 'Jean Genie'- a record that had me poring over the works of Jean Genet, looking for clues to the song's fabulously obscure lyrics - it was kept off the number one spot by a fairly mindless anthem called 'Blockbuster' by glam wannabees Sweet. But both works had exactly the same guitar riff. What was going on, we all wondered. Maybe there wasn't so much to this thing, after all. If it was about playing at being cheap, trashy and kitsch then the only authenticity that you could apply to glam was to be all of those things but for real. It was this aspect of the genre that I wanted to explore in my new novel Johnny Come Home. My fictional glamster Johnny Chrome is a plastic creation, his irony and campness is entirely unconscious but his success is dependent not on what he knows but what he embodies.

Paul Gadd was already in his thirties when he decided to become the Liberace of glam. He'd been around the block more than once - starting out on the skiffle scene, trying to make it as Paul Raven the rock'n'roller in the Fifties; in 1964 he'd found work as a warm-up man on the TV pop show Ready Steady Go, only to be exiled to the Hamburg circuit for the rest of the decade (the Sixties had passed him by so comprehensively that he instinctively connected to the adolescents who had missed out on that great party). He teamed up with record producer and fellow pop veteran Mike Leander at the end of 1971. They spotted a trend and, for once, they were just a little ahead of the game. Gary Glitter was born. Such opportunism might have only afforded a novelty one-hit wonder had it not been for the strange chance of economic necessity. When he recorded his cash-in single 'Rock'n'Roll' there was neither time nor money to cut a proper B-side so an instrumental version was laid down and called 'Rock'n'Roll Part 2'. It was this number that found itself on the DJs' playlists, an unintentionally minimalist anthem that seemed strangely avant-garde in its emptiness. The newly baptised creature found himself on Top of the Pops miming to nothing, but his bizarre dumbshow demonstrated more perfectly the heightened theatricality of glam than any lyrics could. There was a kind of idiot savant genius to it. 'Very few other people in the world could have carried it off,' said his manager Laurence Myers. 'The name became synonymous with glitter and glam rock.'

Given his present circumstances it is unsurprising that there is a tendency to airbrush Gary Glitter from the history of glam, but the fact remains that he became the embodiment of the genre. He was its reductio ad absurdum, proving that it was meant to be cheap and vulgar and trashy. In perfectly duplicating all the elements that the more knowing players had toyed with, he succeeded in presenting something that was entirely fake and therefore intrinsically genuine. The perfect pop product of the simulacrum: the copy without an original. As Mike Leander put it: 'Glam rock was all about putting on a spectacle.' It was this very spectacle that the Situationists in the Angry Brigade had wanted to attack when they had tried to blow up Biba. Little could they have known how garishly bright and stupefying this sideshow was to become. 'Behind the glitter of the spectacle's distractions,' wrote arch Situationst Guy Debord, 'modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a banalising trend that also dominates it at each point where the most advocated forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and objects available to choose from.' But the kids, the consumers, were already becoming bored with this particular fireworks display. I remember catching my PE teacher, in a moment in the changing rooms when he did not realise he was being observed, doing a little Gary Glitter stomp to himself and singing along to the chorus of 'I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am)', and I knew it was over.

David Bowie retired Ziggy in the summer of 1973. 'I felt somewhat like a Dr Frankenstein,' he told Melody Maker. Marc Bolan had his last top 10 hit ('The Groover') that year. That he named his band after a dinosaur proved horribly apt. He just couldn't evolve. 'Sadly, Marc would never develop further than the three-minute single,' said Tony Visconti, who produced both Bolan and Bowie. 'I wish he had. With David the glam rock smoothly segued into a kind of art rock.' Bryan Ferry's dress sense began to aspire to elegance rather than shock value: 'I remember that there was this great jacket of Antony [Price]'s with black sequins and a green chevron that I wore on Top of the Pops, but shortly after that you saw Gary Glitter wearing the same kind of thing and that's where the tuxedo came in.'

Glam was a brittle confectionery, a fragile artifice that could scarcely bear its own weight. It was an adolescent thing, not meant to last. Bowie went on to transform himself with a bewildering series of images, sounds and personas throughout the Seventies, keeping us all on our toes until punk came along. Ziggy had been an appeal to something higher, a glimmer of hope at a time when everything else seemed so dull. 'If we can sparkle he may land tonight' is the evocation in 'Starman'. It's easy to ridicule but there was a forlorn melancholia to it; perhaps glam's brash pyrotechnics were simply distress flares fired upwards through the gloom of the early Seventies.

For Pete Donne, becoming a glam kid in the summer of '72 was to fix the course of his life. A fan's enthusiasm for popular music became a vocation. In 1979 he started to work at Rough Trade Records, described by the NME as 'the best music shop in the world'. He still works there now and admits that 'the excitement of that time was to inform everything I've been interested in terms of music for the rest of my life'. And I got to meet David Bowie. It was at a gig in 2002 at the Hammersmith Odeon, the same venue where he had killed off Ziggy Stardust nearly 30 years before. Someone threw a feather boa on the stage and Bowie gamely draped it around his neck, joking: 'I left this behind last time I was here.' But there was a sombre note among the glam reminiscences of the evening. During 'Moonage Daydream', his guitarist gave a rendering of Mick Ronson's searing lead solo that was so evocative of Ziggy's old guitar buddy that for a moment it felt like the spirit of the late, lamented Ronson was in the room. At the end of the number Bowie looked skyward and with a plaintive smile asked, 'Alright Mick?'